Okay, welcome everybody to Western Bulk's second half and full year investor presentation. Starting with our disclaimer. As most of you will know, our business model as an asset-light operator is to match vessels and cargoes in markets. We add value to the clients by providing an optimized transportation service. We also offload or provide a service of offloading risk for our clients in a freight market and offer them future fixed freight rates. Today, the summary of 2024 second half, our Net Time Charter improved in the markets which had low volatility and also a market that was moving against seasonality. We spent the year and lowered our G&A by 50% to $22 million. We also had negative impacts by one-off by $4.2 million, which we will come back to later. $28 million in free cash. No outstanding debt and $35 million in financing available.
Although the market has been improving fast, we do have a muted market view for the first half of this year. That's based in fundamentals. High order book in Ultramax and Supramax, Ultramax markets, and also we see the demand side being relatively weak. If you had last year, you had the Panama Canal that was disrupting the market significantly, and you also had China, which was front-loading commodities for the first half of the year. You don't have that now. People, culture, data, these are the key priorities that we are working on in Western Bulk at the moment to become the best. Let me go through these one by one, a bit more details. In Western Bulk, people are definitely the most important factor deciding if we are losing or making money.
We have lost too many talented people over the years, so we are taking steps to improve our retention rate, looking to attract the best people and to get the most out of the people that we do have. Also, we have a good foundation for a cooperative culture in Western Bulk. The teams are pulling in the same direction. This is sometimes difficult in trading companies, but we have a good culture where people are pulling in the same direction and putting the company first. However, we have identified that if we're going to be the best, which is our vision, we need to enhance our performance culture. This is also something we are going to focus on over the next months in detail. Also, when it comes to using data in chartering decision-making, it's extremely important focus for us.
It's very important that it doesn't become like a management phrase, but that actually everybody in the company is open for it and is willing to have a close dialogue between the chartering team, the tech team, research team, the analysts. We all need to work on this together. I believe that my background from chartering can be really helpful in achieving this goal. The potential here is huge. You could see in a lot of companies that you have a chartering team that doesn't trust the data. It might be for good reason. You might have quite a few hurdles to go through, but I'm sure we can become one of the companies that actually leverage data to make better decisions and thereby making more money. Paying dividends, it's all one of the huge potential things we are seeing to work on here now.
I will leave it to Kenneth to go through the numbers.
Yeah, results. We focus on our adjusted results, with a full year Net Time Charter of $28.6 million and earning after tax of $2.6 million. Adjusted results then excluding extraordinary costs of $1.1 million related to the redundancies and $4.2 million related to provision for future loss on contracts. The Net Time Charter of $28.6 million includes a gain of $4.6 million from the sale of Western Oslo in Q3, as also reported earlier. I think for the second half, has had a rather good spot trading, in particular, taking into account the low market volatility, which Torbjørn Gjervik will refer to.
He will also refer to the fact that we positioned vessels into the Atlantic for seasonal push, which did not materialize, and that also was influencing when you look at the second half figures. Although, a significant improvement from last year, it is not necessarily something that we are satisfied with the results.
G&A of $25.5 million, when excluding the $1.1 million in redundancy costs. That is also excluding bonuses, then it is down by $0.4 million from last year, excluding bonus. We are very confident that we will manage below $22 million from 2025 when excluding bonuses. Yeah, Torbjørn has commented already, extraordinary costs for redundancy $1.1 million and then the contract values $4.2 million, where $1.4 million is related to the physical contracts and $2.8 million related to FFAs, how it is measured at December 31st. Looking at the balance sheet, we have $28 million free cash, no outstanding interest-bearing debt, and $35 million in available financing that leaves an available liquidity of $63 million, which we are confident with. Working capital requirements at about $15 million-$20 million. As you see, accounts receivable and bunker stocks is what fluctuates.
We have a decrease of about $4.5 million in working capital requirements since last year, due to a bit lower volume at the year-end and book equity of $50 million. Just briefly also on the purchase options, we sold the Western Austral for, with a profit of $4.6 million in Q3. We have two other similar options, not expecting to make necessarily the same amount on those, but likely to be sold in the market against the margin, as we do have a view of a declining Sale and Purchase market. I will leave it to Torbjørn .
Yeah. This chart is just showing the lower market volatility, and where we are on the curve when it comes to that second half of 2024. I think low volatility, and counter seasonality has been a challenging environment for operators to navigate, but we see more volatility coming into the first half of 2025. Lots of geopolitical uncertainties and factors for that can play a role. By the end of Q3, our Atlantic position was standing at 20 vessels, 25 vessels. We have positioned them in with relatively small investments from the East. Backhaul voyages primarily with steels. Again, the market did not move as we anticipated. The great season out of the Atlantic was slower than we expected. When we saw that the season did not come, we took the ships off the table and reduced the risk, going into the rest of Q4.
But it's important for us to mention that this is part of our strategy. We have a business model where the core business, the basic business of serving our customers in spot markets is going to be slightly profitable or cover the cost of the company and plus a margin. But in order for us in this competitive operator world to make the big money and the bigger returns, we will also need to do positioning. If you go 10 years back in operating, there was probably less transparency, and there was probably potential to sit and only trade on low risk mispricing. But going forward in this market, the companies that wants to be the most successful will also need to take some moves.
Those moves in Western Bulk will be done only a few times during the year when we see that the risk reward is heavily in our favor, and we will allocate the risk and investment thereafter. This is what happened in Q4. By doing this strategy, we will hit it right more often than we will hit it wrong. So over time, it will be profitable. Going back to the Q4 backhaul from in play. We saw back then that basically eight out of eight years from 2016- 2023, the second half in the Atlantic was stronger than in the Pacific. And in six out of the eight years, the increase is more than $5,000 a day with an average rise of $7,500. Just to show the risk reward upside, downside versus the upside here.
So if the Atlantic market had right risen by $5,000 a day during August to September, the net strategy from this play alone would have been $15 million-$20 million. So, that's just worth keeping in mind when I still have some numbers behind it when I say that the risk reward was like it was. Okay. So Supramax index, first quarter, obviously started with a pretty big decline in the rates. Nothing unusual. And also bounced back post Chinese New Year, also very, very usual seasonality in dry bulk. So, we have spent this quarter on getting rid of expensive tonnage that we had left on the books and also renewing the good performing vessels at lower levels. So it's a good job by our fleet performance team that has worked in close cooperation with our chartering team in selecting which vessels to continue and which ones to discontinue.
I hope this will lay a good foundation for the rest of the year and we remain positive for 2025 to be a profitable year for Western Bulk. I think that's about it to say about that side, yeah. Market view, there has been a rebound in the spot levels as I just said, especially in the Pacific. The Atlantic has also seen an increase, but much less. Fundamentally, it's quite tight with tonnage in the Pacific at the moment, whilst in Atlantic there is ample supply. We also have seen that an increase in spot levels has regained some optimism in the FFA, has been pushing Q2 up. But we expect this to be overpriced soon. Again, we are not too optimistic for the first half of 2025 for the reasons that I explained earlier in the presentation.
I think that will mean we will not go overboard stacking up with pure tonnage after the push has come and we're already happy with what we already secured earlier in the quarter and build the cargo book from here for the next few months. In general, something that is more and more on our mind at Western Bulk and I'm sure for most others in our industry as well is that we are cautious about trading too much on historical and really have to stay on top, stay on the ball when it comes to all the geopolitical uncertainty and tensions, what that has to say for how we can position ourselves for that. The highlights, improved trading performance from 2023.
We are building the company by improving it step by step, working closely with the chartering team, with the operations team, with the other teams and a Net Time Charter of $28.6 million adjusted in a challenging operating year like 2024. It's at least not too bad, and we feel that's a good foundation to build from going into 2025 and improve further with a lower cost base now below $22 million. The good thing also, strong cash position, $28 million in free cash. We are ready to capitalize on any opportunities that might come in the market. Nothing restricting us on the trading at all. Open for business if we see potential for partnerships, mergers, joint ventures, acquisitions. We are really exploring the whole plate and we feel we are on the offensive.
There is a lot of good things happening in Western Bulk and we are focusing on the people we have to get the most out of those people working here and also the culture in the company to further build that one, get that winning culture that we want to have and we believe will take us to the top and improvement initiatives that I mentioned as well. And once again, muted market view for the first half of 2025, but optimistic further out on the curve and in general for the results of the year as a whole. I think we can open up for questions. Okay.
Yeah.
I say thank you to everybody for joining, and I wish you a good week ahead.